Donald Trump asserted his dominance over the Republican Party on Tuesday as voters in northern Kentucky rejected congressman Thomas Massie in favour of the US president’s hand-picked challenger. Ed Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL and farmer recruited by Trump, defeated the seven-term incumbent in a primary election for Kentucky’s fourth congressional district. The contest was widely seen as a test of whether dissent could survive within today’s Republican Party.
Massie, a libertarian-leaning conservative, had repeatedly broken with Trump over military action against Iran, government spending and the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump treated the race as a personal vendetta, branding Massie a “moron” and a “loser”, and dispatched top advisers to run a Super PAC against him. The president even travelled to Kentucky for a rally denouncing Massie as “disloyal to the United States of America”.
Gallrein campaigned almost entirely as a loyal foot soldier for Trump’s agenda, accusing Massie of suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome” and pledging to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the White House. According to the Hill website, the race became the most expensive House primary in history, with spending of $25.6m on television, radio and digital advertising.
Speaking to supporters after his defeat, Massie said he had called Gallrein to concede. “We’ve been honourable the whole time and we’re going to stay that way,” he said, issuing a plea for “basic decency” in politics. He noted that Tuesday marked six months since the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which forced the justice department to make public millions of documents. “We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture – and that was just six months,” Massie said. “I’ve got seven months left in Congress.”
Massie joins a list of elected Republicans, including Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who were ousted or retired due to their opposition to Trump. Over the weekend, Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to convict Trump after the January 6 insurrection, lost a primary in Louisiana after the president backed challenger Julia Letlow.
